They were standing three deep in the DIT Kevin Street canteen on the first day of term and the music was deafening. Canteen Madness, we read on a poster, and we were in thick of it. There were so many nice young lads with polar fleeces and, dare I say, acne that the only seats to be had were on the window sills and we were too old and creaky to start clambering up on them. Then they started the Blind Date contest.
"I'm a typical fresher - young and innocent," said this ultra-confident fellow into a microphone, addressing four girls who were giggling behind a white curtain. "What would it take to make a man out of me?"
"Ten or twelve pints," said my sister, under her breath, as we passed through to the food. She had drawn the shortest possible straw in the restaurant review game. No Thortons or Guilbauds for her, not even a homely pizzeria or an afternoon tea gig in a snazzy hotel.
We were on a mission to find out what young people are eating at college. The news is that it's not very different to what they were eating 15 or 20 years ago, but at least the ambient smells have improved a bit. DIT has a well-run canteen on the first floor and a wall of glass lets you look down over the concourse below. It has a cheerful take-your-bread straight-from-the-sliced-pan informality. You take your tray and move along to a small salad bar stacked with cheese slices and rolls of plastic-looking ham. Plenty of preservatives and not many vitamins there, so we passed straight through to the hot food counter where you can have full meal or just soup and a roll or a plate of chips.
"What'll you have?" said a polite man behind the counter as we hummed and hawed over the steaming vats. "I'll have soup." "You serve yourself to the soup," he said moving on to the next person. So I did, while Elizabeth went for sausage rolls and chips. The croquette potatoes looked so good that I asked for a couple of them on the side and got a plate with eight of them.
Further on you can get milk by the glass and add chocolate powder from a big bag. There's bread, butter and jam for the really hungry. With a diet Coke and Club Lemon the bill came to under £5.
My minestrone soup had probably tasted all right two hours before when it was made, but now it was rather cool and the pasta bits were soft and shredded.
The potato croquettes were delicious and I had to stop myself from eating all of them. The sausage rolls were bone dry and flaky, while the chips needed their coat of brown gravy to liven them up. All in all, you wouldn't want your kids dining here every day for three years.
THE MIASMA of chips and cabbage that hangs over The Buttery in Trinity is the same as it always was but the space has changed quite a bit since I last dined there. It was a typically rainy autumn day and we were in a mood to reminisce, though, since I didn't go to Trinity, the conversation was bit one sided.
"Wow, this is all different," said Kate, looking slightly dazed at the sight of so many students.
The Buttery used to be a very dark forbidding sort of place, especially to a blow-in from UCD, but now it looks brighter and more hygienic. There's even natural light coming in from Botany Bay, although next door is the cellar-type bar if you want the genuine Buttery atmosphere of yore.
This time we had to join a long queue that snaked halfway around the room. It's quite regimental. Batches of people were being allowed into the serving area, with a traffic warden there to stop them dodging and weaving.
Catherine wanted salad and she gathered a few sad looking spoonfuls onto her plate before being shunted on - by the time she realised that you could get jacket potatoes it was too late. We fared a bit better at the hot food counter, where I had the Special, a pork and rice plate with lurid chunks of pineapple. It came with complementary cabbage and a free cream cake. Kate had the other Special, a vegetarian stir-fry with chips, and also got a cake thrown in.
Once our trays were full we were ushered towards the till where the bill for three came to £12.69. Students get a 20 per cent discount with a Trinity ID card.
"Now, to find some good-looking men," said Kate, as we toured the room looking for three free seats. We zeroed in on a couple of mature Spanish students who looked absolutely miserable, as anyone would if they came from a place where you get fresh vegetables and fruit and tasty tapas in the most modest cafes.
I suppose all you could say about this food was that it was hot and filling, and that the chips were an improvement on the early 1980s version.
Catherine liked her pasta and kidney bean salad, all two spoons of it - but the brown bread she had taken to fill up on was totally stale. My pork special was predictable - chunks of tough, fatty meat shrouded in bright orange sticky sauce with hard rice underneath and appalling stewed cabbage all over it.
Kate was fairly repelled by her vegetable stir-fry which managed to be dry and sticky at the same time. She quickly moved onto the cream cake - it was a squidgy sponge with a dusting of nuts on top and a scrape of jam in the middle, homely but not very interesting. My coffee slice would have been nice if the cream hadn't been quite so sour.
WE SCOOTED across the bridge to the Winding Stair Cafe on Ormond Quay, one of Dublin's very best cafes for students and anyone else who likes to take a lot of time over their coffee and fags. It has been considerably smartened up in recent times and the ointment pink facade has been painted over in a cheery yellow. Inside there are more tables over three floors and it's all waitress service.
The service is a bit more efficient too. Previously you had to allow quite a lot of time for some sensitive soul to assemble a sandwich and reappear waving a plate and saying "Salami roll, anyone?"
Now they have a longer menu of salads, soups and sandwiches, and a few more cakes to go with the coffees. We had excellent - and cheap at £1.30 a shot - double espressos and slices of carrot cake and lemon seed cake to pick at.
All you would need on a cold afternoon, with the view of the Liffey rolling by and the Inkspots playing in the background. You can sit on for hours, missing as many lectures as you like.
